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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source?

One of the biggest problems
of philosophy is the problem of consciousness. How is it that our
brains, made of matter, are able to produce human consciousness?
Matter seems to be something completely different from consciousness.
So for a brain to produce consciousness almost seems like blood
dripping from a stone, a case of one thing producing a totally
different type of thing.

There have been numerous
attempts to explain the production of consciousness by the brain, but
none have been very satisfactory. It may be time to consider a
radically different hypothesis about consciousness. What if
consciousness is not actually produced by the brain? What if
consciousness arises from some external source, and the brain is
merely a receptacle for consciousness? (A receptacle is an object or
space used to store something.)

Such a theory may seem
outrageous at first, because the average person always observes
consciousness associated with brain activity. So does that not prove
that the brain causes consciousness? Not necessarily. What we observe
is consciousness correlated with brain activity. Whenever we observe
consciousness, we also see brain activity. But correlation does not
prove causation. The fact that x is always observed with y
does not prove that x causes y or that y
causes x.

Let me give a simple example
that will illustrate this point, one that will actually help to
suggest a theory of consciousness very different from conventional
theories. Imagine a very young girl who lives in a house with a
flower garden in its backyard. The small girl hasn't yet gone to
school, and knows nothing about the details of flowers or bees. The
only times she ever observes bees is when she sees them hovering near
the flowers in her garden. For this young girl, there is a 100%
correlation between the observation of bees and the observation of
flowers.

The girl then comes up with
what seems to her to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for where
bees come from. She concludes that bees are produced by flowers--
that flowers make bees just like apple trees make apples. This theory
fits with all of her observations and knowledge. The actual truth is
quite different – the bees come from a distant source (a bee hive)
and they are attracted to flowers. But since the girl knows nothing
of bee hives, she doesn't think of this explanation. The girl
misidentifies something local (the flower) as the cause of something
(the bee) which actually comes from something distant (the bee hive).

It could be that the average
person who concludes that consciousness is created by brain activity
is just like this little girl. It could be that each human
consciousness arises from some distant external source, and then is
somehow attracted to a newborn human. It could be that a human body
acts as a kind of receptacle for human consciousness, but does not
actually produce that consciousness. This external source of
consciousness could be rather like the beehive, a person's
consciousness could be rather like the bee, and a human brain could
be rather like the flower – something to which consciousness that
arose from elsewhere is attracted towards, and hovers around.
Somewhat like the little girl mentioned above, we may be
misidentifying something local (our brains) as the cause of something
(our consciousness) which may actually have originated from something
distant (some unknown external source of consciousness outside of our
bodies).

Let us consider another case
that will illustrate this point that correlation does not prove
causation (and which will give another example where something local
is misidentified as the source of something with a distant source).
Imagine a scientist in the year 1700 trying to explain comets. The
scientist would consider all the observations he knew about comets –
that comets seem to appear rather suddenly out in space not far from planets such as Mars and Jupiter. The scientist might then
conclude: planets produce comets. He might guess that comets are
occasionally burped out from planets rather like a man spits out
food. Given his limited knowledge, he would have almost no other way
of explaining comets.

Again, this would be a case
where a local source is misidentified as the cause of something which
comes from a distant source. Now we know that comets come from a
ring-like cloud of comets called the Oort Cloud located far beyond
the orbit of the most distant planet. The comets come from the
distant source we cannot see because they are attracted (by gravity)
to things we can see (the sun and the planets). Similarly, it may be
that a human consciousness arises from some distant source we know
nothing of, and that an individual consciousness is somehow attracted
towards some local thing that we can see, a newborn human body.

It might be that the human
brain is not what is producing our consciousness. It might be that
the human body is just acting as a kind of receptacle for
consciousness that originated from some distant source.

This receptacle theory of
consciousness may appeal to anyone who thinks that human
consciousness is something that is too wonderful and amazing to be
produced by a few pounds of gelatinous mass like a brain. If you
think that things such as the plays of Shakespeare or the theory of
relativity or the symphonies of Beethoven or the dialogues of Plato
are something too sublime to have been produced by a few pounds of
flesh, you may be attracted to the idea that our consciousness comes
from some higher external source – perhaps something (material or
immaterial) that is a lot more lofty than a few pounds of flesh.

One advantage of such a
theory is that it removes the difficulty of explaining how natural
selection was able to create all the wonders of human consciousness.
As explained in this post, it is hard to explain how Darwinian
evolution was able to produce quite a few features of human
consciousness (such as aesthetic appreciation, spirituality, and
philosophical reasoning abilities) that do not seem to have any
survival value, from a Darwinian standpoint of "surviving until reproduction." But if our consciousness comes from elsewhere, this
difficulty goes away.

We know that brain states can
have an effect on the current state of our consciousness – for
example, someone with Alzheimer's disease can lose his memory, and
someone with a stroke can lose some mental abilities. Does that prove
that your brain produces your mind? Not necessarily. The state of
your television set affects how good a picture you see, and if you
smash your TV set with a hammer, you won't see your programs as well
as before. But that does not show your television set produces the
television programs. The television programs come from elsewhere.
Similarly, your mind could have originated from an external source,
and the current state of your brain could act as a kind of limit on
the current state of that mind.

Now let's consider: what, if
anything, might be evidence to support such a receptacle theory of
consciousness? It seems that anything suggesting that human
consciousness can exist outside of the body might be evidence against
the assumption that consciousness is produced entirely by the human
brain. We might say that any such evidence, if it exists, would tend
to enhance the credibility of this receptacle theory, or at least
“raise its stock” by quite a few points.

Evidence for near-death experiences (NDE) might therefore tend to lend credence to this
receptacle theory. If your consciousness somehow originated from
an external source, and then somehow came to dwell in your body, then we
might expect that your consciousness might survive for at least a
while after your brain function stopped.

Near death experiences seem
to be quite incompatible with the idea that the brain is the sole
producer of consciousness. If these experiences are not just
hallucinations, then one almost needs some kind of miracle to account
for some of these near death experiences, under the assumption that
the brain is the sole producer of consciousness. But if we postulate
that our minds came from some external source, then something like a
near-death experience follows rather naturally from such an
assumption. Returning to the analogy of the hive, the bee, and the
flower, we should not be surprised if the bee leaves the flower if
the flower is severed or dies.

Of course, the meaning of
near-death experiences is certainly debatable. My purpose in this
post is not to show the likelihood of this receptacle hypothesis of
consciousness, but merely to present it as an interesting alternative
to the conventional idea that consciousness is entirely produced by
the human brain.

It may be argued that the
theory I have suggested isn't really a theory, because it makes no
predictions. To the contrary, there are some predictions that seem to
follow from such a theory. These include the following: (1) all
attempts to exactly explain the production of consciousness by
analyzing neuron activity will be futile; (2) we will never be able
to transfer or store minds by replicating brain states; (3) we will
discover further evidence along the lines of near-death experiences
and other phenomena suggesting consciousness can exist when the brain
is not functioning. I don't know whether any of these things will
come true, but at least they seem to be predictions that follow from
a receptacle theory of consciousness.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.